Balancing local values and energy system implications: social and environmental impacts from wind deployment in Europe

In recent years, the deployment of wind energy has grown rapidly due to cost reductions and the need to decarbonize energy systems. However, the increase in wind energy projects has exposed significant local obstacles, leading to resistance to the development of new wind capacity, which could in turn affect the European energy transition and the achievement of climate targets at the national and continental levels.

Concerns about social and environmental impacts, such as landscape visual impacts, the vulnerability of birds and bats, and the avoidance of protected conservation areas, have become increasingly relevant to the acceptance of wind energy projects. These considerations have been studied extensively over the past decade to understand their influence on the social acceptance of wind energy projects. Additionally, recent studies have focused on incorporating these aspects into national energy system models to examine the potential implications and trade-offs of future wind capacity. However, few energy system model studies at the continental scale have accounted for different levels of acceptance of wind energy deployment and examined the system design implications and their trade-offs.

In this work, we examine how different levels of acceptance of social and environmental impacts of wind energy can shape the technology’s role in Europe’s net-zero ambitions and what implications this may have for the design of continental electricity systems in 2050. Using a high-spatial and temporal resolution electricity system model for Europe, coupled with a long-term whole-energy system model, we limit land availability for wind energy deployment by defining different levels of acceptance to social (setback distances, noise, shadow flicker, and landscape visual impact) and environmental (protected conservation areas and the vulnerability of birds and bats to wind turbines) considerations, and then determine the cost-optimal electricity system design subject to them.

Our results indicate that as acceptance of social and environmental impacts decreases, land availability and installed onshore wind capacity decline. To compensate for this consequence, solar PV and offshore wind play a more important role across the continental electricity system, supported by increased battery storage. In the more restrictive scenario (high social and high environmental: high-high), some countries, such as the Czech Republic and France, also install nuclear capacity as part of this shift. In terms of total European system costs, all the scenarios show a 2-14% rise compared with the less restrictive scenario (low-low). However, these costs are not distributed evenly across all countries: some, such as the Netherlands, show decreases in costs in some scenarios, whereas expenditure in Germany (by far the costliest electricity system in our modelling) increases by only 7% in the most restrictive case.

Our findings can help the general public understand the potential consequences of different local-scale decisions for the wider European electricity system. Moreover, this study can serve as a basis for decision-makers to develop local-level policies that mitigate and compensate for the impacts of wind energy deployment and, in so doing, increase the social acceptance of future projects.